Marianne Taylor

"SOMETIMES headlines and cover images are much blunter than the articles that accompany them,” the New Statesman’s deputy editor Helen Lewis told the BBC when asked to explain her magazine’s controversial front cover.

This is something of an understatement – unlike the image in question. For those who haven’t seen it, the cover features a drawing of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Tory Home Secretary Theresa May, Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall and Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor and one of the most powerful people in the world. The four stand around an empty wooden cradle, with a ballot box where the baby should be; Merkel looks (forlornly, wistfully?) down towards the empty little bed. It’s a cross between Soviet realist propaganda and a 1950s poster for the Mothers' Union.

“Why are so many successful women childless?” yells the headline.

There is surely only one reasonable response: it’s none of your bloody business.

The article itself, written by Lewis, is a worthy and extensive examination of how difficult it is to be a parliamentarian and a mother, and how society’s “motherhood trap” still requires women to forsake promising careers and high salaries in order to be unpaid carers.

With this in mind, why did the magazine feel the need to accompany the piece with such an offensive, out-dated and provocative cover?

I’m clearly not the only one to have taken umbrage. Nicola Sturgeon herself took to Twitter to describe the image as “crass”, noting that it reinforced the very stereotypes and prejudices the article seeks to highlight. Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, who doesn’t have children either, went even further: “Oh, do sod right off.”

Now, I have no idea why none of the powerful politicians featured in the image has children. More to the point, however, I have no right or inclination to find out. They may have wrangled about the issue over many years. They may have lost previous children or be unable to conceive. They may not have met the right person to start a family with. They may not have wished to take time out of their career while it was on the up. Or, they simply might not want children. The choices, developments or disappointments of these women’s private lives are exactly that – private.

What is particularly wrong and depressing about this cover is that it openly invites, even implores us, to place a value judgement on the fact that the women depicted don’t have offspring. Should we pity them? Are we to judge them selfish?

This debate rings both personal and professional bells for me. Last year, while on assignment for another reputable news organisation, I was asked to interview a senior female politician. As is usual, I discussed with colleagues what we wanted to get out of the interview. The approach of a female editor shocked me. “Let’s be honest, what everyone really wants to know is why she doesn’t have children,” she said. Really? And there was me thinking that most people wanted to know about her policies. Would I have been directed to ask her male equivalent the same question? I very much doubt it.

During the interview, the subject discussed her political motivations, her approach to politics, her hopes and ambitions, her party’s policies. Was there ever a moment where I felt it would be necessary or appropriate to ask her why she didn’t happen to have kids? Of course not.

Like that politician, I am in my 40s and have no children. I can’t conceive of being asked professionally by a relative stranger to “explain myself” on this issue. Why should any politician, or indeed anybody else, be different?

Like many women with similar personal circumstances, I all too often sense society’s basic need to categorise such a “discrepancy”, because that is what it is still viewed as, in a simple manner that people can “understand”. Women with no children are still viewed as career-obsessed, sad and infertile, or, well, a bit unnatural. Becoming a mother is still perceived to be the most important thing a woman can do with her life. But not all women have either the ability or the wish to conform. That’s why the debate around this magazine cover matters.

Ensuring our institutions are fairly represented by both genders is, of course, vital, as is making sure we give families the support they need so that both parents can have fulfilling and financially viable working lives.

But surely on a simple level true equality will not be possible until women are allowed – intellectually, socially, and culturally – to see themselves as something other than walking wombs.